Mobile stretchers are frequently used in hospitals to move patients from place to place, which means that hospital personnel must manually maneuver the stretcher. It is desirable that a single person be able to manually maneuver the stretcher with ease, and preferably from one end of the stretcher in order to make it easy for stretchers to pass within the relatively narrow halls of some hospitals. In this regard, it is customary for the person to be at the end of the stretcher which corresponds to the head of the patient, but this also raises a problem with respect to the provision of a handle, because when the stretcher is stationary medical personnel working on the patient may need to have full access to the head of the patient without restriction of any handle.
One traditional approach is not to provide any handle at all at the end of the stretcher. Stretchers typically have collapsible side rails, and when the side rails are in a raised position a person at the end of the bed can lean forward and grasp the ends of the side rails and use them to maneuver the stretcher. However, maneuvering the stretcher while leaning over in this manner is a common source of serious back injuries in hospitals. Alternatively, the person can grasp the end of the bed frame, but it is usually difficult to obtain a secure grasp on the bed frame, and the person must usually lean over in order to reach the bed frame, which presents the same risk of injury just mentioned. A further consideration is that, when the person maneuvering the stretcher leans over the head of the patient, one or both may breathe on the other, thereby increasing the risk that the person maneuvering the stretcher receives from the patient an infectious disease for which the patient is being treated or gives to the patient a common infectious disease such as a cold.
To avoid leaning over when grasping the bed frame, it is possible to use the conventional mechanism in most stretchers which permits the height of the mattress to be adjusted. However, this increases the height of the patient above the floor and thus presents a greater danger to the patient, as well as giving the patient a reduced sense of security. Still another approach with such a bed, without raising the height of the bed, is to push on a piece of auxiliary equipment such as a vertical pole provided at an end of the bed to support an intravenous apparatus, but auxiliary equipment is usually not designed to take the forces required to move and control a stretcher.
A handle has been previously developed for the end of a stretcher, and can be moved between a position in which it is at a height above the mattress and convenient for manually maneuvering the stretcher, and a position in which it is retracted beneath the bed frame of the stretcher. However, this known handle is relatively large and heavy, and increases the weight of the bed. Further, it is relatively cumbersome to operate, because the person operating it must step back from the end of the bed in order to swing the handle from its operative position to its retracted position. Moreover, when the handle is in its retracted position it cannot reasonably be used as a handle, it can hit the knees of persons attempting to work on the patient, and because of its size it can prevent the bed frame from being vertically dropped as low as might be desirable in some cases.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a handle arrangement for facilitating manual maneuvering of a vehicle such as a stretcher, in which the handle is movable between two positions which each permit it to be used as a handle, one of the positions permitting the stretcher to be easily manually maneuvered with minimal opportunity for back injury.
A further object of the invention is to provide a handle, as aforesaid, which does not restrict vertical movement of the bed frame in either of its positions.
Yet another object of the invention is provide a handle, as aforesaid, which is compact and can be quickly and easily moved between its two positions.
A further object of the invention is to provide a handle, as aforesaid, which is simple and inexpensive to manufacture, and which is durable and requires no maintenance.